Up, Up, and Up

I’m blogging in front of the fire in an attempt to warm up after experiencing some Canadian weather over the past week. The locals laughed off my claims that it was cold (-5°C approx) and told me to return in February to experience a real freeze. I’m back at home now, and the rain is hitting the UK pretty hard so I spare a thought for those suffering any loss caused by the flooding in the run up to festive season.

Mash Up

I was invited out to Ottawa to participate in a Pythian ‘mash up’ week. This is an event where we localize remote resources at a location so that they can work together in the same place over the course of a week. For me, it was a great opportunity to bond further with the people that I work closely with day-to-day over IRC. Beyond the MySQL teams, it’s been fantastic to also work, meet, and eat with members of other teams practicing other technologies or disciplines from other parts of the world. Pythian is a multicultural work place, which is such a learning experience in itself. I’m sure that during the week in Ottawa I interacted with someone from every continent on the planet. I believe that this is a unique place of work, and I really appreciate what’s being built here. I’m looking forward to other opportunities in the future, and I’m confident that we’ll work something out to get the UK based DBAs together more often.

Speak Up

In other news, I’ll be hitting the road again soon to speak at the Percona Live UK 2012 conference taking place in London on December 3rd and 4th. I will be speaking there with my colleague Benjamin Mildren about MySQL replication features and products. It’s going to be a fun talk that will include the various corners of replication as we know it today. We will also look into how migrating to MySQL 5.6 could potentially change your HA or backup strategy. How could 5.6 change the tools that you use to support and maintain replication in your environment?

We work in a team that supports many customers across a range of platforms and versions. With it, MySQL 5.6 brings many of the features that we crave and that will offer a native solution to problems where exterior problem solving is needed . I’m personally going to be attending the Cluster/NDB tutorials on Monday and then on Tuesday I’m looking forward to hearing about common_schema from its creator Shlomi Noach, and my friend Peter Boros has a break from his parenting duties to speak about advanced query optimization techniques. Beyond the talks, it’s going to be great to be around the community members again and feel the buzz around the products we all know and love.

If you’ve got your finger on the MySQL pulse, you probably know that there’s another conference ongoing in the UK on the same dates as PLUK. UKOUG, or the UK Oracle User Group kicks off a MySQL stream on Monday the 2nd. This is a smaller track for MySQL, but there are great talks there nonetheless. I attended 2 years ago when 5.5 was announced, and there was great buzz there. UKOUG is sure to offer the chance to talk with Oracle engineers close to the development of the 5.6 features, and that’s something that will be missing from the PLUK conference.

I look forward to seeing you all in December. It would be awesome to have you attend our talk, but otherwise I’m sure there will be chances to catch up elsewhere throughout the conference. I wish a safe journey to all traveling from further afield.